You may know that the hot beverage cups in our stores are made with 10% post consumer recycled material – the first such cups in the industry.

We’ve also made improvements to reduce the environmental impact of our plastic cold beverage cups. In 2008, we switched from PET plastic to polypropylene. Sound a little geeky? I’ll agree, but this move reduced the carbon footprint of our cold cups by 45%!

If you haven’t already heard of our big Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ goals, here are two big ones. We want to have a comprehensive recyclable cup solution by 2012. And we want all of our company-owned stores to implement front-of-store recycling by 2015.

This last one is tough, because not all communities will accept our cups for recycling today. So we can’t just throw a recycling bin in your local Starbucks store and tell you we’ve solved the problem.

We’ve got to work city by city to find (or sometimes create) a recycling infrastructure that’ll take our cups – and frankly everyone else’s cups – for recycling. We invite you to follow our progress.

If you want to join us, we need your help. Take the pledge to make the switch from paper cups to reusable travel mugs.